Archives: Mar 2012

My friends and I recently shot our own 30-minute TV pilot. For those not well-versed in Hollywood lingo, a “pilot” is a trial episode of a new show. Each year, networks like Fox, NBC and CBS meet with well-known writers who pitch them show ideas. A handful of pilots for new shows are approved, and if any of the finished pilots seem like moneymakers, the network signs them on for a full or partial season of episodes.

I can’t get meetings with TV networks. I’m not a well-known writer. My friends and I don’t even have agents or managers. We have the same amount of clout in show business as old men who mail angry letters to studios over reruns of “NYPD Blue” that they find offensive. In fact, we have less clout than those old men, because elderly people are a huge source of revenue for networks. They’re the only people left on Earth who don’t use DVRs to fast-forward through commercials.

Filming your own TV pilot is the sort of thing you do when you’ve lived in Los Angeles for six years and realized that landing a job as a TV writer is about as likely as winning the Powerball or meeting a Playboy Playmate in the men’s room of a Denny’s restaurant. One day your ten-thousandth “Please stop sending us unsolicited scripts” rejection letter arrives in the mail and you say, “To hell with them. I’m going to film something myself. How hard could it be?” So you write a script, buy a cheap consumer-level HD camera and find filming locations where you’re least likely to get arrested for trespassing or stabbed by hobos.

My friends Matt and Mike and I have all worked lower level “gopher” positions on professional TV pilots, fetching coffee for people and running errands. We’ve watched professionals film things. We’ve also been producing five-minute comedy videos online for years. We figured a pilot of our own would have a level of quality somewhere between old episodes of “Saved by the Bell” and – if we were lucky – that episode of “Diff’rent Strokes” where Dudley gets molested by the bicycle shop owner.

It wasn’t as simple as expected. The first mistake I made was choosing a really complicated subject matter for the script. Our comedy pilot was about a homeless man who comes into an inheritance and must learn to readjust to civilized society. Most sitcoms have two filming locations, maybe three. Ours had ten. Plus two montages with multiple locations each. Basically put, I am an idiot.

My second mistake was choosing to only film on weekends, rather than just taking a few weeks off from work and filming it all at once. When searching for actors or crew members to help with your production, nothing quite intrigues them like the idea of giving up all their weekends for three straight months. We found a few actors willing to help us, but had to play the largest roles ourselves. We had no crew members, so whichever of the three of us weren’t in a scene would work the cameras and sound equipment. In a few scenes where all three of us were on camera at the same time, we would just press the record button and have no one behind the camera.

I don’t know how we managed to get good footage. I don’t know how we survived each shoot. All I know is by the end of our three months of filming, the three of us wanted to murder each other. Here’s a conversation from our first day of filming:

Paul: How was that?

Mike: Great!

Matt: Good stuff. Let’s film one or two more takes for coverage. This is gonna be really good.

Paul: Awesome! This is going to be a perfect TV show!

And here’s a conversation from our last day of filming:

Paul: That was shitty. Should I do it again?

Matt: I don’t care. I cease to give a flying shit about any of this anymore.

Paul: I don’t care either. Fuck it. And fuck you too, by the way.

Matt: Fuck me? Fuck you, dickface!

Mike: Would both you guys just shut the fuck up already?

Paul: I hope you both die in a car accident on your way home.

The third mistake I made was assuming that at least 15 percent of things would go as planned. I’m not sure what I did to upset the nature of the universe, but we were cursed from the start. It rained endlessly, delaying and halting filming multiple times. Mike collapsed in the middle of one of our shoots, requiring us to call an ambulance. Our lead actress had to fly to New York at the last minute because of a death in the family. One of our actors simply didn’t show up, requiring us to completely change our opening scene with no notice. A hipster who owns a barber shop threatened to call the police on us, leaving us with only one take of a key moment.

But it’s done. Matt is finishing the editing, sound work and removal of the 94 percent of shots in which I accidentally looked into the camera. You’re not supposed to look into the camera. Matt repeatedly told me not to look into the camera. His mentioning it just made me look into the camera more. I am not a skilled actor.

Is our pilot perfect? No, but it turned out well. It will make people laugh. The footage looks good, the performances other than mine are excellent, and even my acting is still slightly better than Jerry Seinfeld, or The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart in that horror movie he agreed to do in the late-90s. It works, and that’s more than I can say for “Whitney”, “Are You There, Chelsea” and the generic “I’m a detective who’s really perceptive” shows that will eventually replace them.

DULUTH, MN — The Reader Weekly optioned columnist Paul Ryan to Class AAA Superior this week, where he will write for Weekly Todd, an eight page photocopied “zine” occasionally left at whorehouses by Todd Winkle, an elderly pervert suffering from dementia. Content for this minor league newspaper mainly consists of amateurish drawings of an easily flustered talking vagina that the Wisconsin Newspaper Association once called “the Cathy Guisewite of hand-drawn erotica.”

Ryan has written for the Reader Weekly since 2002, when publisher Bob Boone discovered him and naively assumed Ryan would someday write insightful content instead of dick jokes. Ryan is widely considered “over the hill” and has suffered several notable injuries over the past few seasons. Last year he had Tommy John surgery to repair his writing arm, and his work hasn’t quite been the same since.

In his prime 10 years ago, Ryan was a Nobel Laureate and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, where he wrote about boobs and various things he was proud of having urinated upon, just like he does now. But the genre of poor taste Ryan helped pioneer has been hurt by an oversaturation of material over the years. Film and TV studios now produce brash sexual content almost exclusively. Crudeness, it seems, has become a cliche.

“Hunter S. Thompson once said, ‘When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro,’ and that’s become very true,” said Miguel Gorbachev, a world-renowned expert on classic literature and badger fellatio. “Crudeness is done, it’s passe. Once the mainstream establishment starts using it to make money, it ceases to be a tool for the nobodies to freak out the squares.”

Ryan doesn’t seem concerned. He likens himself to actress Lindsay Lohan, who’s also been reduced to producing mediocre content during rare bouts of sobriety.

“She’s an unbearable, obnoxious piece of garbage, just like me, and she also only has $14 in her checking account right now, just like me, but we’ll both rise again,” said Ryan through a translator, who for some reason was hired to translate Ryan’s comments into Chinese. “The Reader Weekly doesn’t like me now, but just wait until I write my next column! It’s a list of tips for students, or tips for Irish people or something. I dunno. It’s gonna be a list, though. People love lists. Hu Jintao shangdi baoyou, wo de makesi liening zhuyi de lingzhu he zhu!”

Ryan then asked his translator not to translate the last sentence, so people won’t know he’s a Communist-Marxist-Leninist spy.

Despite being demoted to the minor leagues of shitty, irrelevant news publications, Ryan’s contract still allows him to earn his full salary of $3 in Brewhouse gift cards this year. However, Publisher Boone’s move will still free up nearly $6 in Duluth Family Sauna “dude massage” coupons the following year. Boone will use those coupons himself.

Asked what Boone told him to work on in Superior, Ryan said, “He basically just wanted me to work one town away from him so I’d stop deleting his cellphone contacts and shaving his cats while he sleeps.”

Besides Ryan, the Reader also optioned reporter Barb Olsen to AAA Superior. Boone said Olsen was writing content that made the rest of the newspaper look “really shitty” in comparison. Rumor has it Boone is looking to use her freed up gift cards to hire Duluth News Tribune Editor Robin Washington.

The News Tribune is expected to counter this by offering Washington occasional use of the company jet, which is actually just an old cardboard box that columnist Jim Heffernan found in a dumpster and decorated like an airplane. Heffernan and colleague Sam Cook often ride in the box together, taking turns pouring each other martinis and pretending they work for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Ironically, Star Tribune reporters often play make believe in a similar cardboard box, pretending it’s a coffin and that sweet, sweet death has freed them from their miserable, thankless line of work.

Ryan has already begun rehabilitating himself and planning his comeback. He’s been working with retired league MVP Slim Goodbuzz to improve his alcoholism, and has even reached out to Hall of Famer Paul Lundgren in hopes of learning how to write a coherent sentence that doesn’t include the word “vagina”. Scouts have noted multiple appearances by Ryan at Lundgren’s 12,000 square foot solid gold mansion in East Duluth.

“Paul Ryan wants to be that guy,” said Scout Paul Whyte. “He wants to be unreasonably wealthy, like everyone else who writes part-time for alt-weekly newspapers in markets that can barely support two movie theaters. He’s got the drive, but he’s almost 33 years old, and I tend to wonder if he has any magic left in him. Most alcoholic, meth dealing, slut hoarding, Pokemon collecting, cocaine-fueled necrophiliacs like Paul lose their ability to write around the age of 27. Here’s hoping a family member molests him or he loses a leg in a farming accident so his writing can become interesting again.”

To his credit, Ryan said he’s been trying to get molested for decades, without any success.

In the meantime, be sure to catch Ryan’s new column, “Feeble Meanderings”, in Weekly Todd. This periodical is available exclusively in massage parlors and bars with wood chips covering the floor.

I’m so depressed. I wasn’t before I walked into McDonald’s, but the mere act of entering this place has given me the desire to hang myself. Everything’s so bleak here. It’s like an interior decorator specifically arranged everything – and everyone – to convey the ultimate feeling of sadness.

“Let’s see. I’ll put a mentally challenged woman with one tooth staring into space with a haunting melancholy over there, then a morbidly obese guy sipping from the same cup of coffee for six hours in this booth. He’ll be wearing sweatpants and a wife beater, and the seat of his booth will have a groove in it shaped exactly like his ass. Finally, I’ll take a homeless guy who’s missing an eyeball, give him a giant shopping cart full of garbage, and have him jerk off in a corner booth while mumbling the name of the youngest daughter from the TV show “Family Ties”. No one will ask him to leave because $6 per hour just isn’t worth the risk of getting a money shot from a homeless cyclops. Ta-da! It’s my greatest work yet! I’ll call it, Capitalism’s Lowest Option.”

Eating in a McDonald’s feels no different to me than eating in the waiting room of a car repair shop. The floor tiles are chosen because they’re easy to hose down, and are the closest neutral color to both vomit and hobo poop. It’s understandable, because every hour at every McDonald’s in the world, the following things happen: 1) a drug addict pukes up a cheeseburger, 2) a homeless person pulls down his pants almost enough to dump on the floor without soiling himself, and 3) a sex offender ejaculates on the window that looks out into the children’s play area. All three of these things happen simultaneously at 33,000 McDonald’s locations worldwide every hour, as reliably as the clockwork of Big Ben, and the hose takes care of it all! Five seconds, tops. Whoosh!

Seriously though, most restaurants have at least some sort of vague “Please don’t sleep here” or “Please don’t bring a shopping cart full of trash in here” policy, and ask offending people to leave. Not McDonald’s. Have you got enough change for a cup of coffee? Well then, big spender, feel free to use our dining area to organize your aluminum cans, or treat one of our booths like a Japanese capsule hotel. We really, really want that 75 cents you spend each day.

To be fair, small town McDonald’s restaurants are usually fine. This is because in a small town, if a mentally challenged person doesn’t have a place to live, people choose to help them rather than let them roam the streets eating stray cats and drinking sludge runoff from dumpsters. It’s a quaint little concept. Duluth is large enough to have hobos, but they’re really hard to tell apart from the gainfully employed drunks. I once gave a scuzzy-looking bearded guy on the lakewalk a quarter, and he called me a dick and said his band’s CD costs $12.

Big city McDonald’s restaurants need to decide whether they want to be makeshift homeless shelters or actual restaurants where people can eat without feeling compelled to check the pulse of the elderly guy slumped over in the next booth. Small town McDonald’s restaurants just need to work on the food. Everything I eat at home is microwaved frozen food, so my standards aren’t exactly high. Just don’t keep things under a heat lamp for two hours, and try not to smash my burger with your fist before serving it to me. If my nose is broken and I’m unable to open my mouth very wide without discomfort, I’ll flatten my own burger. Thanks, though.

Also, please stop putting whipped cream on everything. It’s getting ridiculous. Even when I order a cup of water, I feel like I have to remind them not to put whipped cream on it.

Don’t get me wrong. McDonald’s serves a valid purpose in my life. It’s a great place to take your elderly parents who think sushi is “weird” and Denny’s is “too fancy”. It’s good in March for getting Shamrock Shakes, even though they now serve them in thin plastic cups that cause them to melt into a puddle 60 seconds after you get them. McDonald’s is great for friends from abroad who want to justify their hatred of American culture. It will also be a lovely place to live a few months from now when I finally max out my last credit card and become a vagrant. But it needs improvement.

You can do better, McDonald’s. Get strict with the homeless people, start making food fresh, try to get rid of that vague farts/failure smell that lingers in all your restaurants, and go back to serving shakes in paper drink cups that insulate properly. Otherwise I’m switching to Wendy’s. Their restaurants have their own TV network with video clips of teenagers skateboarding and blowing things up.

The sitar music. The goddamn sitar music. I can’t take it anymore! It’s driving me insane. Day or night, no matter the time, the sitar music continues playing. Softly, gently, elegantly eating my brains from the inside. It’s torture. Each chord is like another little bead of water dripping on my forehead.

An elderly Middle-Eastern woman recently moved into the apartment building across from mine. This being Los Angeles, our windows are roughly eight feet apart. The sitar music never ends. It’s always playing in her apartment, even when she’s not there. My TV drowns it out, but I spend most of my day writing and I need quiet for that. I’m not good at concentrating. No TV, no music, no distractions of any kind or my mind will wander. For instance, right now it’s wandering toward murdering this old woman.

The worst part is I can’t complain about it, because she’s playing the music at a reasonable volume. It’s not loud. It’s just that the sitar, and the weird howling that passes as singing in her native country, is perhaps the most obnoxious sound in the universe. She probably feels the same way about American music, but do I play the “Friends” theme song over and over again, 24 hours per day? No! I play it four hours per day while I masturbate.

A few times each week, a man comes to her apartment and the two of them argue loudly. I look forward to this, because it’s the only time I can’t hear the goddamn sitar music. How am I supposed to work in this atmosphere? My publisher has given me a June deadline for my erotic pirate novel, “Boobs Ahoy!!! Starboard Wieners!!!” How am I to finish it if this noise pollution continues?

I really wish she was Armenian. The violent arguments would be the same, but the sitar might be replaced by a duduk, which is the Armenian instrument used in all those mythical adventure movies like “Lord of the Rings.” Sitar music is so unbearable that I’d even prefer bad karaoke singing. There are millions of untalented wannabe singers here in Los Angeles and they all sound like a hungry baby goat, but at least they take a break once in a while.

I never realized sitar music was something people listened to non-ironically. The last time I heard it was at the beginning of “Baby You’re a Rich Man” by The Fat Boys, and even they knew it was only good in moderation.

My apartment is a mecca of annoyance lately. I’m being attacked on all sides. Upstairs is the ugly nurse. I use the term “ugly nurse” because episodes of “30 Rock” have changed my view of a typical nurse from an elderly woman taking four tries to find a vein in my arm to Selma Hayek packing eight pounds of boobs into a shirt that only holds four. So the woman upstairs is the “ugly nurse”, packing zero pounds of boobs into a shirt that holds 50.

The ugly nurse works the early shift, and since the walls of my cheap apartment building are thin enough to hear a gnat ejaculating, any noise past 7pm louder than a sneeze results in a knock on my door and a stern lecture. When I politely and kindly suggest that she die in a rat’s anus in hell, she complains to the landlord. My dream is to wake up one day to find she’s died of bitchiness.

In the apartment below me is a chain smoker who seems completely unaware that everything she says is delivered in a shout. She comes home from work every night and discusses seven year old episodes of “Sex and the City” with her friend over the phone, repeatedly stating that she “can’t wait until the next episode.” Well, hurry up and watch it, you jackass. It’s been on DVD since Jesus was born.

I’m tempted to buy a Mr. Belvedere DVD box set and a box of nicotine patches and drop them off at her door to push her towards becoming a better person. Sadly, my bank account is nowhere near topping my March 2009 record of $23, so I’ll have to use the more cost-effective solution of getting her to leave by turning up my laptop speakers extra loud when I view pornography.

Which is often.

I haven’t had a roommate since college because I don’t like being bothered. Being surrounded by these neighbors is like having three roommates, except I can’t retaliate against their annoying personalities by smashing their possessions or passive-aggressively eating their food from the refrigerator, like most people do with troublesome roommates.

I guess I’ll just have to put up with it. This seems very un-American, but it’s the only way since I’m too poor to move out and too handsome to jump off a freeway overpass. I can only hope I develop Stockholm syndrome and start to enjoy sitar music. And when that happens, I give each of you permission to kill me.